Can i ask you to have a look at ....

Hi mate. I'm not sure if i can bother you to have a look at the roborunner changes i made. Maybe the development state is a little to early, but i would like to know what you think.

What is new:

• configuration - included, no need for external scripts and Windows should be supported as well
  • just type CONFIG and go through the options
  • this will make all internal robocode directories (depended how many installations you want)
  • it should be quite fail prof and checks the input for validity
  • you also can re configure it if you want to switch to another robocode version or something
• challenges - can be switch on the run
  • type CHAL to go through the options
  • the challenge file format should be the same as it where before
  • all missing bots will be copied to the instances (well not new but it works like before)
• the processes stay initialized
  • that means if you have once started the instances they are ready to take more battles after the challenge is over
  • or you can switch to another challenge and run it on these instances as well
• you can stop running challenges
  • if you type STOP while the challenge is running all processes stop the current battles and can be restarted (they stay initialized)
• with DEBUG you get additional informations (about the messages and some standard output from the processes) - i plan to make this configurable so you can see what you want
• with AUTORUN the next time you start the program it takes the last configuration and challenge and runs it automatically
• with STATUS you get the configuration and running state of all processes
• HELP shows some help (not much yet)

What is not ready yet:

• everything with result output is not finished yet
• the results are coming back from the processes (and will be printed to the console) but there is no processing on these informations right now
• i plan to take your code and then it will be possible to print results with whatever output you prefer (also offline results)
• basically this means - you can say: show me result bla (avgDmg,score,cats,dogs - whatever) and it will be extracted from the current available results

I would be interested if it runs with all the cpu you have and has no concurrency issues. And if the usability is ok.

I had to change quite a lot but it has still the spirit of your RoboRunner and should work as same as yours. It is based on a very basic communication protocol to make it extendable for later needs.

You can find it here: roborunner_wompi.zip. To start it just run the ./rr.sh (same as yours)

If you don't trust the class files, the sources are included or available from GitHub as well.

You don't have to play much with it, just a quick start and configuration and one of the example challenges would be great. This should only take a couple of minutes.

Take Care

Cool, I'd be happy to take a look! I particularly like the idea of having a Windows-compatible setup. I think my main concerns from your changes are:

• If RoboRunner stays running after finishing a challenge, that would screw up how I often use it, which is having multiple dev versions queued up in separate runs via shell script. So I'd either need to make that configurable, or also add support for running batches (which I guess would also be necessary if ever we have a GUI).
• The interactive commands sound really powerful and I would definitely use them :-), like when a dev version is tanking and I want to just kill it and move onto the next one I have ready to go. But I also like simplicity and not having a big learning curve to using RoboRunner, so I just want to make sure it doesn't feel like "you have to learn a bunch of commands" in order to use it. So I'd like to make sure you can get by without knowing them, and/or that they're really easy to find and learn about. A lot of how I use RoboRunner is queueing up a few runs and leaving it for hours, so I definitely want to keep full support for non-interactive batch runs too.

Thanks man! Very cool to have someone else using and contributing to this. :-)

And I promise I have not forgotten about the custom scoring, I just haven't gotten to trying out some of my ideas with it. I was curious if you're still using that in your development? And if so, what kind of stuff do you collect and how do you like it?

Yes i rewrote most of the original stuff to be highly configurable. I'm a little unhappy with all the changes right now but i hope in the end it will pay off to have something really nice to run test beds. It's fairly easy to provide batch runnings with multiple dev versions. I just have to make the challenger input ',' separated and then it runs all challengers against the current challenge. Or maybe a input file where all challengers are included (linked to whatever challenge).

I guess i use RoboRunner in a sightly different manner right now. While writing on my bot i make a quick dev jar and let the runner make a couple of battles against my test bets. Therefor i can still make changes - and in the background the first results can show me if i was wrong or if i'm on the right track with my changes. That's why i wanted the processes alive. What i had in mind was having RoboRunner running infinitely and if a new version arrives he just grab it and runs the challenge against the new bot version . I also can switch the challenge on the run so if i think i need another view of my development state its just one switch to the console. I'm defiantly on your side of having RoboRunner making its stuff without maintainance. The console is just to have a tool to make changes if you think you have to. And beside of the config stuff its just a run command now.

The main reason because i switched to a communication protocol, is having the possibility to improve later versions with more fancy stuff like diagrams on certain battle states and such stuff. I don't know if you run some melee tests as well but for me its better to have just a couple of precise test beds rather than just let the challenger run against everyone above a certain level. I guess this will be more important if i go for an appropriate 1v1 strategy (someday :)).

About the custom scoring, its more custom battle field statistics for me. It's still one of my main targets for RoboRunner. Some of my statistics gave me a quite nice view of whats going on on the battle field and for what i should watch out. Like average field population (where are the most crowded spots and how was my survival at this spots) or bullets fired far away from me with more as 6 opponents on the field (how much did i catch a hit of these bullets and where would be a better place to stay). Yes its quite a bunch of other stuff to and most of it is just not worth it but, you know, sometimes you have to think strange.